Martí CV’s Reviews > This Must Be the Place > Status Update

People, Marithe knows, tend to forget you're there.

What can be gained from turning over old coals?

He knows now how a locksmith must feel when he creates the key that finally releases an old rust-shut lock, or a composer when he finds the note to complete a chord.

I am consumed with a sharp longing to be that woman. I want her life, her dress, her dog. I want to be thirty and have a bike with a basket —what is the word for that kind of basket, there is one, I know— and be pedaling home to an appartment with long white curtains and bowls of flowers and a husband who loves me. I want to be over all this, to be past it, to be safe and unreachable in adulthood.

He decided there and then that his life needed footnotes and that he, Niall, should be the one to provide them.

And it seems to me, as I sit there, among the ornamental hedges and genuflecting chrysanthemums, as I spark my lighter with a shaking hand and inhale the smoke, that my life has been a series of elisions, cover-ups, dropped stitches in knitting. To all appearences, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted towards the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief.

A tide has rushed forward, then pulled back out, and whatever was beneath it is altered forever. […] She is searching the windscreen now for my face, wondering why I am not moving forward, but from where she is standing, the glass is opaque with the reflexions of clouds. From where she is standing, I might not even be here at all.